“Good. Now excuse me for a moment; what I’m about to try is somewhat on the tricky side of downright impossible.” (Pg. 264)
A Summary of Rather Impressive Proportions as there were 3 Storylines and 585 Pages of Tiny Print:
Far in the distant deserts of the planet Resurgam, Dan Sylveste and his team of researchers have excavated artifacts of the extinct Amarantin alien species, perhaps with important information as to why the Amarantin had so suddenly died out. However, a violent storm threatens their camp, prompting many to leave. With even his wife having deserted him, Sylveste, the journalist Pascale, and few researchers remain, working furiously to access the pillar, yet before they are able to finish, Sylveste is arrested. A coup had taken place in the city, between archaeologists and terraformers, and the terraforming group had won.
On the massive lighthugger ship Nostalgia for Infinity, Ilia Volyova travels the three to four kilometer length of the ship to speak with her captain. He lies in cryogenic isolation, as does the rest of the crew, since the light travel took multiple years real time, but need not affect the physiological age of the body. The captain’s condition is different, and much more deadly. He has contracted a plague, which unceremoniously binds nanotechnology and biological tissue into a grotesque, and generally by the end of the procedure, dead form. The cold restricts the movement of the plague, until a cure can be found. As an Ultranaut crew, the majority of members have implants and bionic parts. Volyova is an exception; her lack of implants allows her to converse with Captain free of harm. Heated up enough to allow cognitive thought, Captain Brannigan assists Ilia with her problem of a Gunnery Officer gone mad, Nagorny. Eventually his insanity pushed him to homicidal tendencies, forcing Volyova to kill him. Unsure of how to break the news to the rest of the crew, specifically his lover Sudjic, Captain tells Ilia to fake a reefersleep pod malfunction to blame for Nagorny’s death.
In Chasm City, on the planet Yellowstone, Ana Khouri sets out on her assassination mission. She is a member of Shadowplay, a group dedicated to being hired by wealthy citizens to hunt said rich folk, so the customers could feel a thrill, and bragging rights as long as they were alive. After her latest kill, Khouri finds herself being taken by a mysterious person, the Mademoiselle. She wants to hire Khouri to kill Dan Sylveste. There is a secret Sylveste is soon to stumble upon, a secret capable of killing the entire human race. Thusly, the Mademoiselle reasons, Sylveste needs to be killed, to ensure stopping him from acting. If that was not prompting enough, the Mademoiselle has Khouri’s husband Fazil, a love Ana Khouri thought long lost when, as a soldier, she was accidently sent to the wrong planet, and because of light travel, was planets and years away from him.
Both Ana Khouri and Ilia Volyova need to find Dan Sylveste, one to kill him, one to enlist his help. Thus, Khouri fills the position of gunnery officer on the Nostalgia for Infinity, though she keeps her true intentions secret, along with the digital imprint of the Mademoiselle in her implants. This representation of her employer encounters another electronic infiltrator in the gunnery system, Sun Stealer. While Khouri drifts to reefersleep, Mademoiselle and Sun Stealer rage a war in Khouri’s mind. She awakens when the ship meets Resurgam, where much has happened since the original expedition to the Amarantin site. While in jail for nearly a decade, Sylveste was eventually allowed access once again to the archaeological dig where, without him, an entire city had been unearthed, linking the alien race with massive voids in the space named shrouders. Along with studying, Sylveste marries Pascale, who not only had joined him on multiple ventures, but was daughter to the leader of the city. Unfortunately, a second coup apprehended any further advances in the Amarantin study, capturing Sylveste and his wife. The revolution brought Sylveste and Pascale to a shock; Sluka, Sylveste’s wife during the first expedition on Resurgam, thought long dead, was heading the rebellion. With the crew of Nostalgia for Infinity closing in, the Mademoiselle ready to rejoice in Sylveste’s death, and the man himself in captivity under the new rule of Resurgam, adventure waits around every corner, soon leading to a venture near the neutron star Hades where all is to be explained.
The Chosen One, and Why It Is So:
When I originally bought this book, there were three other candidates for this project. One was quickly ruled out, as it was The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and roughly 1000 pages long. The Hunt for Red October, a Tom Clancy novel, was an excellent read, but I felt rather unwilling to do an entire project on it. This left Revelation Space and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. I favored the latter for a while, what with its fancy Hugo award, before realizing that both books followed multiple story-lines, and I already could tell that in TheWindup Girl I would greatly prefer one over the other. This would likely prove frustrating, and so I settled with Revelation Space, and was quite pleased with its highly intelligent ventures into the alien realm of outer space.
Genre- Robots and Light Speed and Rockets, Oh My!:
From environment to gizmos, Revelation Space heartily proves itself as a science fiction novel. Beginning on a far off planet, Reynolds delves into the idea of alien species, and excavation of long past civilizations. However fairytale they seem modernly, the actual possibility of other sentient life in the galaxy is sizable and Reynolds exploits that. He creates multiple beings vastly different than humans, as theoretically aliens should be. Yet, with the fiction element of the book, Reynolds creates the Shroud alien species, where what they lack in physical similarity, make up for in a near dead on rendition of the human brain and thought process. Also, the manner of space travel in Revelation Space is a mere few percent less than light speed. The author utilizes his knowledge of the space-time continuum and it affects the timeline. For example, Khouri is hired years before the kill is to be executed. Another aspect of science fiction in the story is the AI’s. There are three levels, alpha, beta, and gamma, each with a leveled proficiency of consciousness. Along the lines of artificial, bionic parts are abundant, going as far as to preserve a character from the 21st century. The technology stands theoretical in present day, but stands possible all the same, pushing this book into the science fiction genre.
The Big Ideas:
One main theme in Revelation Space is the escalation of intelligence. Not only are there many inventions and technological achievements, but the aliens each are at a different stage of continual enlightenment. Humans are far enough along to reach the extents of the galaxy. The Jugglers contain vast quantities of information from races across all space and time. Even higher still are the Inhibitors, who regulate the advancement of life in order to avoid mass war. They are very similar to one another, only set apart by the amount of which they understand, as if they were the same person in different stages of life, youth, adult, and elder. Another key idea is the unknown. Reynolds paints a dark and mysterious space, full of secrets and puzzles. For example, Conjoiner engines work, yet no one seems very sure as to how. The air of ambiguity can make the galaxy vast and intimidating. Even as Sylveste investigates Cerberus, sates his long-lived curiosity, it is fearful as the planet could just as easily harm as assist. Finally, tied with the Inhibitors, is the question of whether life gets worse the more one knows. The Inhibitors seem to believe so, as they rid the galaxy of advanced life once the species is deemed too skilled. The Inhibitors trust the joy of merely being alive is enough, and better, than sentience that brings conflict. Contradicting them are the Shrouders and Humans, both who resist this treatment. Perhaps the Inhibitors are wrong, using power they do not deserve to make decisions for an entire galaxy. Then again, other species may be too young to understand it is for the better, and the war that would undoubtedly come would be worse than anything ever to be imagined.
Conflicts of Major Proportions:
The conflict between time and matter arises often. For example, Captain Brannigan should have died long ago. Yet, via mechanical implantation, he lives without the biological components which so easily decayed over time. The longevity of humans is also expanded by the cryogenics used in space travel. One could be alive for hundreds of years, yet their body could be only thirty. Also, on the more fiction side of lines, Hades, the planet computer mistaken as a neutron star, was created when a black hole switched a line of time and matter, linking the past, present, and future versions of itself. All aspects of life strive for longer survival.
The Dawn War spawned the Inhibitors who decided as long as advanced life existed, harrowing conflict would ensue. Thoughts eternally sparked fights, from Dan Sylveste versus Calvin Sylveste, to the Inhibitors themselves against the Amarantin. The coups on Resurgam always came from different ideas of what should be done to the planet, whether scientific research or terraforming. A solution to the problem, of sentience against sentience, is rare if not nonexistent, as exemplified by the Inhibitors, who tried to solve it by getting rid of the players, yet by this, they themselves engaged in the war they tried to end.
Another conflict is the superbug concept, where higher technologies provide bigger problems with stronger tolerances. For example, without implants the Nostalgia for Infinity could be near impossible to control, as manually it could require multiple people for a single job. Then again, without implants, beings such as Sun Stealer could not exist and wreak such havoc, taking control of the ship and murdering the majority of the crew. Another instance is when humans are augmented with robotic components. It strengthens the being, extending durability of the body and often making the person faster and stronger. However, the bionic parts are susceptible to substances biological items are invincible to, such as the Melding Plague. It is give and take, where one always strives for more take than give.
Characters:
Dan Sylveste is a scientist, specifically of the study of the ancient alien race of the Amarantin. He is also part of the prestigious Sylveste family, son to well-renowned scientist Calvin Sylveste. Dan is intelligent and stubborn, to the point of obsession. Even when faced with the dangers of a razorstorm and coup, Sylveste refuses to relinquish the dig site, so intense is his wonder in the Amarantin. Driven to snarky and arrogant edges, Sylveste quite heartily believes in his superiority in intelligence; though it does not completely apprehend his social skills. The big-headedness surfaces most commonly around his father, such as this remark of “’Is that all?’ Sylveste had said, just loud enough so that everyone in the room heard it. ‘An old bone? Well, thanks, Dad. I’m humbled,” (5). However egotistical, Dan cares for others, deeply so at times, such as for his wife Pascale. When captured by Sluka, Dan repeatedly asks about Pascale’s well-being, and the second he gains any leverage demands to have time with her. He’s had multiple wives, but each was driven away by his infatuation with archaeology rather than any cruelty on his behalf. A truly believable character, Sylveste confidently portrays his strengths and flaws.
Ilia Volyova is a member of the crew, specifically a triumvir of the triumvirate, of Nostalgia for Infinity. She is an ultra, however has no implants. Volyova is tough and quick, as shown when dealing with Nagorny. With no traces of lucidity left in the gunnery officer’s mind, Ilia felt no guilt over what she needed to do. When attacked by the officer and dropped down the elevator shaft, Volyova quickly spun a solution as,” she had seen herself, not falling through the ship, but stationary, floating in absolute rest with respect to the stars. What moved, instead, was the ship: rushing upwards around her.”(49) With this thinking, she used the ship's thrust to save herself and defeat Nagorny. Ilia is also moral, to an extent, as she is also rather frank and ready to act in a simple, harsh manner. She has no qualms threatening the planet of Resurgam to gain contact with Sylveste quickly, but could never actually use the firepower she threatened on citizens.
Sun Stealer is the mind of an Amarantin, who ventured forth from the safety of the Shroud to see whether the Inhibitors still lived. He is a genius, advanced far past human technology. The Mademoiselle states, “In the way it evaded them [her virus programs], it revealed itself to be much cleverer than almost anything in my experience.” (194). In total, Sun Stealer is often viewed as psychotic. “It was difficult to see where Sajaki ended and where his eviscerated remains began,” (503) is a description of what the being did to the crew member. Once viewing the façade of Sun Stealer, “she [Volyova] thought back to Nagorny, and understood how the man had been driven mad,” (498). Then again, all that Sun Stealer does is for his people. He was hurt by the near extinction of the Amarantin, and thus it is understandable he would go to any lengths to ensure the survival of the remainders of his people. As explained by a member of the crew, “You don’t want anything to stop Sylveste reaching Cerberus. That’s why we have to die now; in case we find a way to stop him,” (499). Sun Stealer is not unreasonable, as “Sun Stealer waited, silently, and then continued to answer all the questions she had for it,”(501). Though he shows no remorse for the harm he tries to commit to humanity, his reasons are valid. Though not necessarily moral, Sun Stealer may be much more lucid than he lets on.
Words. Woords. Woooooooords.:
“’That would not suffice,’ said the Mademoiselle, with what Khouri sensed was a new candour.” (188) Candour is the action of being blatant.
“There were furrows and traceries embossed into his skin which he had almost forgotten, yet it could not be more than tens of day- a few weeks-since he had been blinded in the Amarantin tunnel system.” (234) Traceries are decorative and dainty lines.
“That actually hurt, at the visceral level which somehow betrayed it as not having been simulated.” (305) Visceral means understood not through intelligence but emotion, such as an instinct.
“Lines appeared on the plain, forming a starlike mandala centred on the same focus.”(396) A mandala is a geometric representation of the stars with religious connotations.
“The illusion of verisimilitude obviously can’t be foolproof at distances less than a kilometre or so.” (397) Verisimilitude is looking true and honest, whether one is or not.
Similar Works:
In both the videogame series Mass Effect and in Revelation Space, the antagonist is an ancient race that decided sentience could not exist without conflict and resolved the issue by wiping out life entirely. However, where the Mass Effect rendition of the Milky Way is full and lively, Reynolds creates a much more vacant and daunting environment. The sheer magnitude of the galaxy is translated well, as in Across the Universe by Beth Revis. Though it does not leave the confines of a spaceship, the ship may as well be a planet, what with its layers and farms, and its city. Like the Nostalgia for Infinity, Godspeed of Across the Universe holds cryogenically frozen people, capabilities of accelerated travel, and as previously mentioned, is in general ridiculously large. The two books also share a sense of dystopia, with a touch of hive mind. Like The Giver or Uglies, Revelation Space looks at the balance of order and meaning. The two sides of a coin, intelligence brings great joy and great fear as the universe opens itself, terrifyingly beautiful. Freedom comes into play often, not only in the large-scale battle for the right to live between humanity, the Amarantin, and the Inhibitors, but again in the unregulated space travel. As in Firefly, the Nostalgia for Infinity flies the skies devoid of any higher power, besides their captain. Resurgam faces many coups, but only against its localized government, like the rim planets. It adds to the bigness, reminiscent of Star Trek and its innumerable worlds. Revelation Space is in short, big, and reminds of many a good story.
Symbol:
This sun is comprised of scrawled words. From goals to battles to the phrase Sun Stealer, they twist around in the form of a star, surrounding ‘human’. Revelation Space is filled with aliens, alien species, alien concepts, and alien worlds. Yet, throughout them all, interlaced with the thoughts of the Shrouders, entwined with the pain of the Amarantin, riddled even throughout the empty gaps of infinite space, was something familiar- something undeniably human. Whether this is because of humans’ limited senses, limited grasp of anything otherworldly, or because the limitless bounds of the universe may just hold something primal that is true for all life that is to be forever unknown. For the while, however, humanity is left with the simple, intelligent tale of brethren to earth, dependent on lovely, lively suns.
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
“Good. Now excuse me for a moment; what I’m about to try is somewhat on the tricky side of downright impossible.” (Pg. 264)
A Summary of Rather Impressive Proportions as there were 3 Storylines and 585 Pages of Tiny Print:
Far in the distant deserts of the planet Resurgam, Dan Sylveste and his team of researchers have excavated artifacts of the extinct Amarantin alien species, perhaps with important information as to why the Amarantin had so suddenly died out. However, a violent storm threatens their camp, prompting many to leave. With even his wife having deserted him, Sylveste, the journalist Pascale, and few researchers remain, working furiously to access the pillar, yet before they are able to finish, Sylveste is arrested. A coup had taken place in the city, between archaeologists and terraformers, and the terraforming group had won.On the massive lighthugger ship Nostalgia for Infinity, Ilia Volyova travels the three to four kilometer length of the ship to speak with her captain. He lies in cryogenic isolation, as does the rest of the crew, since the light travel took multiple years real time, but need not affect the physiological age of the body. The captain’s condition is different, and much more deadly. He has contracted a plague, which unceremoniously binds nanotechnology and biological tissue into a grotesque, and generally by the end of the procedure, dead form. The cold restricts the movement of the plague, until a cure can be found. As an Ultranaut crew, the majority of members have implants and bionic parts. Volyova is an exception; her lack of implants allows her to converse with Captain free of harm. Heated up enough to allow cognitive thought, Captain Brannigan assists Ilia with her problem of a Gunnery Officer gone mad, Nagorny. Eventually his insanity pushed him to homicidal tendencies, forcing Volyova to kill him. Unsure of how to break the news to the rest of the crew, specifically his lover Sudjic, Captain tells Ilia to fake a reefersleep pod malfunction to blame for Nagorny’s death.
In Chasm City, on the planet Yellowstone, Ana Khouri sets out on her assassination mission. She is a member of Shadowplay, a group dedicated to being hired by wealthy citizens to hunt said rich folk, so the customers could feel a thrill, and bragging rights as long as they were alive. After her latest kill, Khouri finds herself being taken by a mysterious person, the Mademoiselle. She wants to hire Khouri to kill Dan Sylveste. There is a secret Sylveste is soon to stumble upon, a secret capable of killing the entire human race. Thusly, the Mademoiselle reasons, Sylveste needs to be killed, to ensure stopping him from acting. If that was not prompting enough, the Mademoiselle has Khouri’s husband Fazil, a love Ana Khouri thought long lost when, as a soldier, she was accidently sent to the wrong planet, and because of light travel, was planets and years away from him.
Both Ana Khouri and Ilia Volyova need to find Dan Sylveste, one to kill him, one to enlist his help. Thus, Khouri fills the position of gunnery officer on the Nostalgia for Infinity, though she keeps her true intentions secret, along with the digital imprint of the Mademoiselle in her implants. This representation of her employer encounters another electronic infiltrator in the gunnery system, Sun Stealer. While Khouri drifts to reefersleep, Mademoiselle and Sun Stealer rage a war in Khouri’s mind. She awakens when the ship meets Resurgam, where much has happened since the original expedition to the Amarantin site. While in jail for nearly a decade, Sylveste was eventually allowed access once again to the archaeological dig where, without him, an entire city had been unearthed, linking the alien race with massive voids in the space named shrouders. Along with studying, Sylveste marries Pascale, who not only had joined him on multiple ventures, but was daughter to the leader of the city. Unfortunately, a second coup apprehended any further advances in the Amarantin study, capturing Sylveste and his wife. The revolution brought Sylveste and Pascale to a shock; Sluka, Sylveste’s wife during the first expedition on Resurgam, thought long dead, was heading the rebellion. With the crew of Nostalgia for Infinity closing in, the Mademoiselle ready to rejoice in Sylveste’s death, and the man himself in captivity under the new rule of Resurgam, adventure waits around every corner, soon leading to a venture near the neutron star Hades where all is to be explained.
The Chosen One, and Why It Is So:
When I originally bought this book, there were three other candidates for this project. One was quickly ruled out, as it was The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and roughly 1000 pages long. The Hunt for Red October, a Tom Clancy novel, was an excellent read, but I felt rather unwilling to do an entire project on it. This left Revelation Space and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. I favored the latter for a while, what with its fancy Hugo award, before realizing that both books followed multiple story-lines, and I already could tell that in The Windup Girl I would greatly prefer one over the other. This would likely prove frustrating, and so I settled with Revelation Space, and was quite pleased with its highly intelligent ventures into the alien realm of outer space.Genre- Robots and Light Speed and Rockets, Oh My!:
From environment to gizmos, Revelation Space heartily proves itself as a science fiction novel. Beginning on a far off planet, Reynolds delves into the idea of alien species, and excavation of long past civilizations. However fairytale they seem modernly, the actual possibility of other sentient life in the galaxy is sizable and Reynolds exploits that. He creates multiple beings vastly different than humans, as theoretically aliens should be. Yet, with the fiction element of the book, Reynolds creates the Shroud alien species, where what they lack in physical similarity, make up for in a near dead on rendition of the human brain and thought process. Also, the manner of space travel in Revelation Space is a mere few percent less than light speed. The author utilizes his knowledge of the space-time continuum and it affects the timeline. For example, Khouri is hired years before the kill is to be executed. Another aspect of science fiction in the story is the AI’s. There are three levels, alpha, beta, and gamma, each with a leveled proficiency of consciousness. Along the lines of artificial, bionic parts are abundant, going as far as to preserve a character from the 21st century. The technology stands theoretical in present day, but stands possible all the same, pushing this book into the science fiction genre.The Big Ideas:
One main theme in Revelation Space is the escalation of intelligence. Not only are there many inventions and technological achievements, but the aliens each are at a different stage of continual enlightenment. Humans are far enough along to reach the extents of the galaxy. The Jugglers contain vast quantities of information from races across all space and time. Even higher still are the Inhibitors, who regulate the advancement of life in order to avoid mass war. They are very similar to one another, only set apart by the amount of which they understand, as if they were the same person in different stages of life, youth, adult, and elder. Another key idea is the unknown. Reynolds paints a dark and mysterious space, full of secrets and puzzles. For example, Conjoiner engines work, yet no one seems very sure as to how. The air of ambiguity can make the galaxy vast and intimidating. Even as Sylveste investigates Cerberus, sates his long-lived curiosity, it is fearful as the planet could just as easily harm as assist. Finally, tied with the Inhibitors, is the question of whether life gets worse the more one knows. The Inhibitors seem to believe so, as they rid the galaxy of advanced life once the species is deemed too skilled. The Inhibitors trust the joy of merely being alive is enough, and better, than sentience that brings conflict. Contradicting them are the Shrouders and Humans, both who resist this treatment. Perhaps the Inhibitors are wrong, using power they do not deserve to make decisions for an entire galaxy. Then again, other species may be too young to understand it is for the better, and the war that would undoubtedly come would be worse than anything ever to be imagined.Conflicts of Major Proportions:
The conflict between time and matter arises often. For example, Captain Brannigan should have died long ago. Yet, via mechanical implantation, he lives without the biological components which so easily decayed over time. The longevity of humans is also expanded by the cryogenics used in space travel. One could be alive for hundreds of years, yet their body could be only thirty. Also, on the more fiction side of lines, Hades, the planet computer mistaken as a neutron star, was created when a black hole switched a line of time and matter, linking the past, present, and future versions of itself. All aspects of life strive for longer survival.The Dawn War spawned the Inhibitors who decided as long as advanced life existed, harrowing conflict would ensue. Thoughts eternally sparked fights, from Dan Sylveste versus Calvin Sylveste, to the Inhibitors themselves against the Amarantin. The coups on Resurgam always came from different ideas of what should be done to the planet, whether scientific research or terraforming. A solution to the problem, of sentience against sentience, is rare if not nonexistent, as exemplified by the Inhibitors, who tried to solve it by getting rid of the players, yet by this, they themselves engaged in the war they tried to end.
Another conflict is the superbug concept, where higher technologies provide bigger problems with stronger tolerances. For example, without implants the Nostalgia for Infinity could be near impossible to control, as manually it could require multiple people for a single job. Then again, without implants, beings such as Sun Stealer could not exist and wreak such havoc, taking control of the ship and murdering the majority of the crew. Another instance is when humans are augmented with robotic components. It strengthens the being, extending durability of the body and often making the person faster and stronger. However, the bionic parts are susceptible to substances biological items are invincible to, such as the Melding Plague. It is give and take, where one always strives for more take than give.
Characters:
Dan Sylveste is a scientist, specifically of the study of the ancient alien race of the Amarantin. He is also part of the prestigious Sylveste family, son to well-renowned scientist Calvin Sylveste. Dan is intelligent and stubborn, to the point of obsession. Even when faced with the dangers of a razorstorm and coup, Sylveste refuses to relinquish the dig site, so intense is his wonder in the Amarantin. Driven to snarky and arrogant edges, Sylveste quite heartily believes in his superiority in intelligence; though it does not completely apprehend his social skills. The big-headedness surfaces most commonly around his father, such as this remark of “’Is that all?’ Sylveste had said, just loud enough so that everyone in the room heard it. ‘An old bone? Well, thanks, Dad. I’m humbled,” (5). However egotistical, Dan cares for others, deeply so at times, such as for his wife Pascale. When captured by Sluka, Dan repeatedly asks about Pascale’s well-being, and the second he gains any leverage demands to have time with her. He’s had multiple wives, but each was driven away by his infatuation with archaeology rather than any cruelty on his behalf. A truly believable character, Sylveste confidently portrays his strengths and flaws.Ilia Volyova is a member of the crew, specifically a triumvir of the triumvirate, of Nostalgia for Infinity. She is an ultra, however has no implants. Volyova is tough and quick, as shown when dealing with Nagorny. With no traces of lucidity left in the gunnery officer’s mind, Ilia felt no guilt over what she needed to do. When attacked by the officer and dropped down the elevator shaft, Volyova quickly spun a solution as,” she had seen herself, not falling through the ship, but stationary, floating in absolute rest with respect to the stars. What moved, instead, was the ship: rushing upwards around her.”(49) With this thinking, she used the ship's thrust to save herself and defeat Nagorny. Ilia is also moral, to an extent, as she is also rather frank and ready to act in a simple, harsh manner. She has no qualms threatening the planet of Resurgam to gain contact with Sylveste quickly, but could never actually use the firepower she threatened on citizens.
Sun Stealer is the mind of an Amarantin, who ventured forth from the safety of the Shroud to see whether the Inhibitors still lived. He is a genius, advanced far past human technology. The Mademoiselle states, “In the way it evaded them [her virus programs], it revealed itself to be much cleverer than almost anything in my experience.” (194). In total, Sun Stealer is often viewed as psychotic. “It was difficult to see where Sajaki ended and where his eviscerated remains began,” (503) is a description of what the being did to the crew member. Once viewing the façade of Sun Stealer, “she [Volyova] thought back to Nagorny, and understood how the man had been driven mad,” (498). Then again, all that Sun Stealer does is for his people. He was hurt by the near extinction of the Amarantin, and thus it is understandable he would go to any lengths to ensure the survival of the remainders of his people. As explained by a member of the crew, “You don’t want anything to stop Sylveste reaching Cerberus. That’s why we have to die now; in case we find a way to stop him,” (499). Sun Stealer is not unreasonable, as “Sun Stealer waited, silently, and then continued to answer all the questions she had for it,”(501). Though he shows no remorse for the harm he tries to commit to humanity, his reasons are valid. Though not necessarily moral, Sun Stealer may be much more lucid than he lets on.
Words. Woords. Woooooooords.:
“’That would not suffice,’ said the Mademoiselle, with what Khouri sensed was a new candour.” (188) Candour is the action of being blatant.“There were furrows and traceries embossed into his skin which he had almost forgotten, yet it could not be more than tens of day- a few weeks-since he had been blinded in the Amarantin tunnel system.” (234) Traceries are decorative and dainty lines.
“That actually hurt, at the visceral level which somehow betrayed it as not having been simulated.” (305) Visceral means understood not through intelligence but emotion, such as an instinct.
“Lines appeared on the plain, forming a starlike mandala centred on the same focus.”(396) A mandala is a geometric representation of the stars with religious connotations.
“The illusion of verisimilitude obviously can’t be foolproof at distances less than a kilometre or so.” (397) Verisimilitude is looking true and honest, whether one is or not.
Similar Works:
In both the videogame series Mass Effect and in Revelation Space, the antagonist is an ancient race that decided sentience could not exist without conflict and resolved the issue by wiping out life entirely. However, where the Mass Effect rendition of the Milky Way is full and lively, Reynolds creates a much more vacant and daunting environment. The sheer magnitude of the galaxy is translated well, as in Across the Universe by Beth Revis. Though it does not leave the confines of a spaceship, the ship may as well be a planet, what with its layers and farms, and its city. Like the Nostalgia for Infinity, Godspeed of Across the Universe holds cryogenically frozen people, capabilities of accelerated travel, and as previously mentioned, is in general ridiculously large. The two books also share a sense of dystopia, with a touch of hive mind. Like The Giver or Uglies, Revelation Space looks at the balance of order and meaning. The two sides of a coin, intelligence brings great joy and great fear as the universe opens itself, terrifyingly beautiful. Freedom comes into play often, not only in the large-scale battle for the right to live between humanity, the Amarantin, and the Inhibitors, but again in the unregulated space travel. As in Firefly, the Nostalgia for Infinity flies the skies devoid of any higher power, besides their captain. Resurgam faces many coups, but only against its localized government, like the rim planets. It adds to the bigness, reminiscent of Star Trek and its innumerable worlds. Revelation Space is in short, big, and reminds of many a good story.Symbol:
This sun is comprised of scrawled words. From goals to battles to the phrase Sun Stealer, they twist around in the form of a star, surrounding ‘human’. Revelation Space is filled with aliens, alien species, alien concepts, and alien worlds. Yet, throughout them all, interlaced with the thoughts of the Shrouders, entwined with the pain of the Amarantin, riddled even throughout the empty gaps of infinite space, was something familiar- something undeniably human. Whether this is because of humans’ limited senses, limited grasp of anything otherworldly, or because the limitless bounds of the universe may just hold something primal that is true for all life that is to be forever unknown. For the while, however, humanity is left with the simple, intelligent tale of brethren to earth, dependent on lovely, lively suns.
Goodreads review:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/430020977